February 02, 2017

Bartolomeo Mereu, Sculpture garden

Located in the south of Sardinia, Italy, this art environment only recently became known by a larger public.

Life and works

Born in 1935 in Dorgali, Sardinia, Bartolomeo Merau had some three years of primary education and then left school to help his parents at the farm.

At age 19, in the early 1950's, he left his family to find employment as a worker in coal mines in Belgium and Germany.

After ten years, in the early 1960's, Mereu returned to his native region, where he bought a bar in the harbour town of Cala Gonone. He rebuilded the bar and re-opened it as a gelateria (an ice cream shop), which he would operate for some 40 years.

In 2005 Mereu became retired. This allowed him to further develop a hobby of wood processing he already had as a youngster.

So he went roaming the adjacent woods to collect stumps of mainly juniper which he transformed into multicolored sculptures.

In the course of the following years he brought about a substantial collection of some 80 wooden sculptures which he displayed in his backyard, along the fence at the entrance or on top of the posts of the entrance gate.

The sculptures vary in size, the smaller ones often depict small animals, such as litlle dogs and birds, the larger ones portray all kinds of personalities, such as people living around and characters from mythology, religious life, history and contemporary politics.

Manufacturing sculptures Mereu makes use of the shapes which from origin are present in his material and thus for example arms of a person can consist of laterally grown branches in the base material.

Some of the larger sculptures of persons are arranged in a line, as if they form the public of a passing parade. Many of Mereu's creations have a humorous undertone.

Mereu's artwork only recently was made known to a wider public by Pavel Konečný, a collector of outsider art from the Czech Republic who travelled a number of times through Italy,. Visiting sites in Sardinia he came across Mereu's art environment.